William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine 1966 Grove Press Hardcover

Description

The Soft Machine is where William S. Burroughs really puts the cut-up method to work. Fragments of narrative are sliced apart, rearranged and collided with one another to create the first installment of what became known as the Nova or Cut-Up Trilogy, followed by The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express. The book first appeared from Olympia Press in Paris in 1961, but Burroughs substantially revised the text for Grove’s 1966 American edition, removing, replacing and rearranging large portions of the original. The Grove edition is consequently not simply an American reprint but a significantly different version of one of Burroughs’ central experimental works.

This is the second printing of the 1966 Grove edition, in the original dust jacket with its $5.00 price intact. No, it isn’t the first printing. But it remains a handsome, early hardcover copy of a cornerstone of Burroughs’ experimental period, published at precisely the moment his cut-up technique was helping blow apart conventional ideas about what a novel could be.

Not the first printing, not signed—and still a good 1966 copy of an essential William S. Burroughs book.